Just Don't Leave (Before I Say Goodbye)
by stopbeingbored
Summary: 2k3!verse, Established!Katanaship. Leo and Usagi have been going out for a while. In the aftermath of an injury, Leo seeks refuge at April's apartment. / "He is going to leave me", Leo says with wild eyes, and April's heart breaks at the sight. / Now finished.
1. Fractured

**AN:** _Thanks for checking out another one of my stories! "Just Don't Leave..." comes in two chapters and is already finished, I'm just polishing it up a bit. So I'll upload the second part some time next week! As always, reviews are highly appreciated._

**Warnings:** _Established slash relationship (Leo/Usagi). Mention of injury. _

**Summary:** _Leo and Usagi have been going out for a while. During a visit in Usagi's dimension, Leo gets hurt. In the aftermath he seeks refuge at April's apartment. / "He is going to leave me", Leo says with wild eyes, and April's heart breaks at the sight._

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**JUST DON'T LEAVE (BEFORE I SAY GOODBYE)**

**Chapter One: Fractured  
**

* * *

"He's going to leave me," Leo says with wild eyes, and April's heart breaks at the sight.

This is Leo, after all, who so rarely shows his emotions around anyone who isn't Raphael, who is always so very confident and so very calm. Her little brother Leo, who tries so hard to be strong for all of them. There is no trace of calmness about him now, quite the contrary: He looks utterly wrecked, terrified and, most of all, so _helpless_ that it is painful to look at. She wants nothing more than to hug him, but she doesn't need Donatello's genius to know it wouldn't be appreciated. And so she sits down on the sofa, pats the cushion next to her invitingly and folds her hands in her lap while she waits for him to calm down enough to settle down.

"Deep breaths, love. What makes you think that?"

She is honestly curious. From what she has seen of Leo and Usagi in the previous weeks, leaving each other seems to be the last thing on their minds. Leo, though, flinches as if she had just delivered a physical blow to his head and all but shrinks back into the cushions. April's concern is growing. Something is obviously wrong.

She forces herself to stay still and keeps her fingers clenched into the hem of his shirt. Leo looks like a frightened animal, and every instinct is telling her to reach out, to touch, but he is still a ninja and she values her hands. It seems to take him impossibly long to answer.

"I let him down," he finally whispers. He doesn't look at her.

The answer is as short as it is non-satisfying, and April wonders what really happened to make the boy in front of her so desperate. "I'm sure it wasn't that bad," she replies, but it's the wrong thing to say; his head snaps up, his dark eyes meeting her green ones for the first time this evening, and he clenches his jaw so hard that she fears for his teeth.

"How can you say that?" he demands through gritted teeth. Now he's angry, but it's a dark kind of anger, the kind he usually reserves solely for himself (but she is only starting to understand that now) and the backlash of which merely hits her by default. "I let him down. I allowed these bastards to get the better of me, and because of that I nearly got us all killed. I am a liability to him!" He breaks off, panting heavily, and she stares at him until he shrinks back again, suddenly timid once more. "He will leave me for sure," he whispers and buries his head against his knee pads.

It takes April a moment to process what he said, and when she finally does, she nearly laughs. Only her worry about him holds her back. "Oh, Leo," she says and tentatively reaches out to touch his arm; his skin is ice cold, always a bad sign, but it is all the more endearing to her. "Just so I understand," she says softly, "you are afraid that he will leave you because he got you hurt?"

"It wasn't his fault!" Leo snaps, suddenly agitated. "It was my own stupidity that got me into the mess in the first place!"

She looks at his arms that are crisscrossed with red and black lines and thinks that no amount of stupidity should amount to something like this. But she keeps quiet, listens instead, as he goes on, voice muffled by his knee pads. "I have never seen - he was so upset, April. It was terrible." He looks sick even at the memory, sick and miserable. "_I_ feel terrible." His shoulders are shaking now, but his voice is terrifyingly calm and flat, and it raises the hair along her arms.

There are several steps she could take from here. The most obvious one would be to send him home to talk to Splinter, to Usagi, but it's not really her place to do that. Maybe she can call Splinter instead. Maybe she'll call Usagi, too, just to get both sides of the story straight. But right now she has a frightened teenager on her hands who is terrified of heartbreak, and how can she really be sure that things will _not _go as he predicts? She does not know Usagi all that well, has no idea of what the samurai code of honor demands. Maybe Leo is right. Maybe Usagi _will_ leave. (No use in thinking that a partner who would do that is not one that Leo ought to stay with at all. Not her place, she reminds herself. Not her place.)

"What do you need?"

He looks up at the question, finally startled out of his thoughts, and then licks his lips. She waits while he struggles with the words, remembering how she felt when she was his age, in his situation. "Can I," he begins and then stops, takes a deep breath, tries again, "can I stay here for a while?"

He looks so worried that she will turn him down. Would she ever? _Could_ she ever? No. Family means no-one gets left behind.

"Two days," she says. "That is what I can offer you. Two days to get yourself sorted out and wrap your head around things. I promise to try and keep the others out that long. But the day after tomorrow, I want you to go home and take care of this."

He looks at her with wide, thankful eyes, and she feels horrible with all the things that she did not say but feels she should have. Instead she gets her medical kit from the kitchen and dabs his wounds with antiseptics before she re-wraps them with neat, white bandages. He doesn't speak throughout the ordeal, barely even moves, and when she is done and leans back, his old mask is back in place. He is the lone wolf once more, the unfathomable warrior that she both depends on and pities so much.

"Sorry to dump all that on you," he says, obviously uncomfortable, and she thinks that no, she is sorry, but what she says is "don't mention it."

They don't talk about it again until the morning two days after when she leaves her room and finds him gone.


	2. Mended

**AN:** _Thank you for reading, faving and reviewing, it really means a lot~!  
_

**Warnings:** _Established slash relationship (Leo/Usagi). Mention of injury. Brief mention of torture.  
_

**Summary:** _"Don't let him leave," he pants. "Whatever you do, don't let him leave before I'm home."  
_

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**JUST DON'T LEAVE (BEFORE I SAY GOODBYE)**

**Chapter Two: Mended**

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Leo's shell-cell beeps on the morning of the second day when he is about to brush his teeth. He has already folded the blankets over the armrest of the sofa and packed up what little he brought with him; all is ready to go, even though he himself is not.

He flips the cell open and reads Raph's message once, then a second time, and then a third when his brain finally starts to process the words. The toothbrush clatters against the porcelain sink when he drops it in his haste; he rinses his mouth with jerky movements and is back in the living room in a matter of seconds. The city outside of the windows is still dark, still sleeping; dawn has only just begun. That's safe enough for him. He grabs his bag and then he all but flies up the fire escape and across the rooftops, his shaking fingers already punching the speed-dial for his brother's phone.

"Don't let him leave," he pants, not bothering to greet the gruff voice that answers. "Whatever you do, _don't_ let him leave before I'm home." He doesn't wait for a reply, just flips the cell closed and speeds up.

A sudden, overwhelming fear causes him to cut corners and perform wild acrobatics at neck-breaking speed. It doesn't seem to do any good, he is still too slow, always too slow; twice he slips and almost falls, plunges into walls and chimneys and yet keeps running as fast as he possibly can. For the last two days he has been pondering on what to say when he gets back home, but now he realizes that it doesn't matter _what_ he says as long as he says _something_, as long as Usagi does not simply _leave_ without another word between them, with nothing but two empty days to remember him by.

The first beams of light wash over the rooftops by the time Leo reaches the manhole he's been looking for. He's panting now, but not from the exercise, and as soon as his feet hit muddy sewer stone he is reaching for his cell again.

It rings once, twice, then someone picks up. He urges out the words before his courage can abandon him - "I'm almost there, five minutes at most, please don't leave, _please_ wait for me" - and the second of silence stretches out until it feels like an eternity.

His heart is beating too fast, it's painful, he is slipping and falling and can't see where the path is leading anymore. None of that matters, nothing does, until finally a deep voice says:

"I am not going anywhere."

Leo nearly breaks down then and there. It takes all his willpower to the call and keep running.

When he finally bursts through the doors to the lair he feels nauseous and lightheaded, and he stumbles over to the kitchen. (He knows that Usagi is in there, knows that everyone else is nearby and listening, the lair is too quiet.) He nearly trips over his own feet and only narrowly avoids plowing into a pillar in his haste, all gracefulness and stealth abandoned in the face of loss. There are a million things that he wants to say, but when at last sees his friend at the table (Usagi, gods, Usagi, small and great and beautiful and looking like a man about to meet his doom), it all boils down to a single sentence.

"I'm sorry," he pants, desperate, terrified.

The silence is too long, and there is something on Usagi's face that Leo has never seen there before (hasn't he? _hasn't he?)_. It is a dark, and deadly, and all-consuming _fury_.

"_You_ are sorry," he says. His voice is all wrong. (Too low. Too unlike him.) "What are _you_ sorry for?"

_What am I -_

Leo stares at his partner, not knowing how to respond. _I'm sorry_. Doesn't that express all that needs to be said? Of what use are specifics? But if this is it, his last chance to explain, if these are his final words, then he will try, oh, he will try. He will try with all his might, and if Usagi still leaves by the time he is done, then he will never utter another word in his life, so the gods help him.

"I'm sorry that I messed up," he says, but that's not enough, he can see it on Usagi's face which is still so very _wrong_. "Sorry that I messed up the plan - I know we didn't - didn't plan for this and I'm sorry that I let them get the better of me like that, I never meant for it to happen, I don't know _how_ it happened, and… And… I'm sorry for- for failing you."

When Usagi takes a breath, it's shuddering and wet and somehow more terrifying than the whole last week combined.

_This is it_, Leo thinks. _This is where he leaves me and rips my heart out on the way, and I will stand here and watch him go._

But when Usagi finally speaks, it is not an accusation and it isn't a goodbye. What he says, with his horribly choked voice, is, "do you even _remember_ what happened?"

_Yes_, Leo wants to say, but he realizes with a start that it would be a lie. _What_ he remembers is that some children went missing from a small village in the mountains. (_One _child. _The _village. Usagi's nephew, Usagi's home town, disappeared, no, _abducted_.) He remembers searching for the boy, remembers the forest surrounding him, thick and dark, the air humming with tension.

He vaguely recalls waking up in a small room with no windows, shackled to a chair, being screamed at and hit until he blacked out again.

_Do you _remember_ what happened?_

"No," he admits readily. It's not like it matters anyway; nothing does anymore, as long as it keeps Usagi with him for another minute, another moment in time. "I don't. But I _must_ have messed up. I mean…" He reaches up to touch the back of his head, to the purpling bruise there that he can't remember getting. Usagi's eyes follow his arm, along the white line of the bandages that wind around it from elbow to wrist, his jaw clenched and his shoulders tense. Leo doesn't seem to notice.

"I think someone hit me," he says, his bewilderment evident in his voice.

"Yes," Usagi says, and his fists are clenched so hard that now that his knuckles crack. "One of them hit you when you were distracted by Jotaro."

He looks like he wants to say more, his mouth opens and closes a few times, but no words come out, and Leo licks his lips, not sure how to reply. _One of t__hem, _he thinks. _Whom? Bandits. _He distinctly remembers dark faces, unwashed and gritty, with sunken eyes and fouling teeth. _Demons. Wild men._"What happened to…"

"He's safe," Usagi says. "Jotaro is safe with his family. Thanks to you." He sounds far too bitter to be telling such good news. "You really don't remember, do you? They were threatening the village into giving them horses and supplies. They knew Kenichi couldn't refuse, but they were afraid of him- afraid of me, too, so they kept Jotaro in the forest while they negotiated with us. They didn't know about you at that time," he ends bitterly, "but once you had freed the hostages, they turned on you. There were too many… Too many for the three of us."

The images come back to Leo with vivid intensity, and he winces in sympathy for his past self.

(_Get the children, _his own voice echoes in his head. _Get them out of here before- _)

His partner's voice drops down to a whisper. "After that, it didn't take them long to realize that _you_ meant something to me as well."

(Usagi's face in the crowd, just a few paces away, shocked and angry, yelling at him, pushing through the crowd of bodies between them… the need to act fast, to wrap this up now, to keep them safe. Keep _him_ safe. Five steps across the grass, familiar fingers reaching out for him, before grubby hands grab him from behind, and there, above it all, the outcry of a child - )

"Stupid," Leo says, almost to himself.

"Stupid," Usagi says, and he sounds like he's choking.

There is another stretch of silence in which Leo tries to bring the fury on his friend's face into line with the story as it presents itself. And he thinks that he finally gets it; in fact, he probably understands it better than most people could. There always have been too many people to look after, and never enough hands, never enough time… And so, when push came to shove, they did the best they could, and it wasn't enough. Infuriating, maybe. _Stupid,_ certainly. But, all things considered, entirely understandable.

"I love you," Leo whispers helplessly, because it is the last truth he has to offer.

"Yes," Usagi says, but it sounds like a question. "I know."

"Thank you for coming for me," Leo says, and there is a whole _different_ question in _that_ sentence, one that he didn't even know he had.

Usagi smiles weakly.

"I love you, too," he says, and somehow, that is the answer to both.


End file.
